OpenCulture I am sure I meant to publicise this earlier… The idea is a simple one:
“An artist lists her work-in-progress with us, along with how much money he or she needs to make the work freely available. We set up a donation fund for the work and invite the public to make donations into it. When there’s enough money in the fund, the artist uploads the work to us. Once we verify that the work has been uploaded, we mail the artist a check. Right away, we make the work available to everyone who donated money toward the work’s release. A few weeks later, we make the work available to the general public as part of the OpenCulture Digital Free Library.
It combines the efficiency of Internet-style free distribution with the certainty for the artist of some reward.”

Unfortunately, the project seems to be on hold at the moment and the library does not appear to have been built. Why not put something of yours forward?

“Everyone loved to hate the grungy, cafe-dwelling slackers of the early ’90s who, midrecession, felt unmotivated and disillusioned about their job prospects when their career options looked like the mailroom or pulling lattes.

When the same kids turned into stock-optioned dot-commers working 80-hour weeks, they became a new kind of cultural whipping boy, at fault for gentrification and the stock market bubble. Hate them when they don’t work. Hate them when they strive and work too much. So why work?”

I love dogs as much as anyone, but I worry about this guy:

“When John Pike, 37, was laid off from his job as a Web programmer for ComedyWorld in mid-January, he was already planning to quit in order to spend time with his new puppy…

“I’m not actively looking for full-time work, and I’m even considering doing something like walking dogs, because I’ve met a bunch of dog walkers and they make tons of money.”

“There are people winning, just not the hard workers. These days, the real winners are those who manage to get out under the wire before stuff gets really bad. The payoff? One month to just sit around watching daytime TV and doing your laundry. A paid vacation. Then, a month of solid job searching. Did I mention that you’re collecting unemployment this whole time?

So, during those two months, you’re actually making more than if you had to get up every day and watch your place of employment gasp its dying breaths.”

If you thought that nakednews.com was just a joke, then you should read this report from the Online Journalism Review. It turns out that nakednews gives better news coverage than most local US TV stations, and it’s not about pure prurience, either:

“…none of these women appears to be on a first-name basis with a plastic surgeon. They range in age from 30 to 42 and Holly is proudly pregnant. It’s more like news from your local nudist colony than anything you’d see on the pages of Playboy…

“We are bringing the North American continent a European sensibility, in which there is a much greater acceptance of the naked body,” says Kathy Pinckert, the Naked News’ Los Angeles-based spokeswoman.”